A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. The word slogan is derived from slogorn which was an Anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm tanmay (sluagh "army", "host" + gairm "cry"). Slogans vary from the written and the visual to the chanted and the vulgar. Their simple rhetorical nature usually leaves little room for detail, and a chanted slogan may serve more as social expression of unified purpose, than as communication to an intended audience.
Marketing slogans are often called taglines in the United States or straplines in the U.K. Europeans use the terms baselines, signatures, claims or pay-offs.
Famous quotes containing the word slogan:
“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On”, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“The slogan ‘45 minutes in Havana’ was not coined in the Cuban city, but in a Yankee cigar factory here.”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)